Saturday, 13 June 2009

As you all know I am a book fiend. I love getting books, though especially good ones. As you also know my dad bequeathedhis books to me. So mama is renting her house out and going to come and live in Regina full time, which means I have to remove my books.

Hercules thought his tasks were difficult.

So I currently have books in every imaginable space at the moment. I started putting them into my library thing, but got tired of that pretty quickly since books older than the mid 60s apparently didn't need ISBN numbers. Pheh.

Our already messy and pulled apart house is becoming a repository for the stacks of books I am sorting roughly by subject.

My old room is housing drama, classic liturature and some general fiction. We've been able to contain that into only a few boxes, which is cool. I haven't delved into the underside of my bed yet though and I think there are some others there.

The hallway is home to Canadian History, with one box being almost entirely books written by Pierre Burton. There is of course plenty on Riel which I threatened mama not to let her friends have.

Beside that is Modern History, WWI and WWII, English history, primary source documents, Mediaeval history as well as books about Churchill in particular. I found some cool magazines about the Parliamentarian period in England, those will probably fit in here too somewhere.

The dining room is where the theology, christian living, devotionals and the like have moved. Most of my books are here too, as you all know theology is my faevrit.

My dad had a lot of evangelical stuff for a liberal in the United Church. Ah so much the better... :)

I still can't find that copy of Good Morning Holy Spirit someone gave him. I was totally going to relish tearing it apart and throwing it page by page into the burning barrel. Of course I may have to come to terms with the possibility that he may have already beat me to the punch. I can't say I'm not disappointed. And surprised-dad would have had difficulty burning even the worst drivel printed in the form of a book.

The living room is holding general fiction (boxes are out of the picture), some cook books and hymn books that mama has stolen from several churches over the years. She tried to deny that it was really stealing and I asked her "uh didn't you just take them from the church without saying anything?" She said "Well yeah of course". uh, mama....

The only woman I know who would steal hymn books.

Most of those are hers (or the church's).

The kitchen is the repository for historical fiction, psych, political science, art, craft (on the floor) and books that I can't categorize just yet. There are some English and grammar books also, thesauruses and dictionaries.

Some of my children's books that I want to keep and the Moore history book with the only picture I have of my now famous shotgun toting Great Grandfather are there.

He doesn't look that bad for a fighter, though the picture is not that great-but then as far as we know he only got hit really really good in the face once in his fighting days and it was an ambush by the loser's girlfriend. I guess the moral of that is even if you have a super long reach, beware sneaky RC girls with heavy socks. Especially if you are wailing on their boyfriends.

Anyway back on task;

Here is mama's bookshelf, still holding vestiges of several genres. These still have to be sorted, but a lot of them are her mystery books. I've picked it apart and taken most of dad's books out, though I've still got some to pull out of there, as you can see. Mama does not for example own Hitler: a Study in Tyranny.

The killer book case now has most of the outer layer of the books removed, and a good portion of the second layer. It's like an onion, and I cry at the thought of what I am going to do with all my precious books. Richard came in and said he never realized we had that many books (I don't know where he was for most of our lives). Then he looked at the shelf and remarked that he had no idea they had been stacked two deep. Oh they were.

The tub contains mostly magazines.

The Durant set is large enough that I'm not sure what I am going to do with them. It would be hard to box them. There are a number of paperbacks there we will probably get rid of (sigh). Atlases and geography books and medical sets are still there as well as many textbooks and the vintage readers.

Speaking of vintage readers, look. It's the very first banned book I ever read:

Ah Mrs Lovequist...

I remember she used to keep her Dick and Jane readers in a locked cabinet, distribute them to us to read and then take them away and lock them in the cabinet again. This was a source of mystery to me for years until my dad told me she locked them up because the administration had banned Dick and Jane and told her if they ever caught her teaching with them she could be fired. So, she just made sure she never got caught. We were the only children in the province who learned to read with Dick and Jane in the 80's and 90's.

I was actually discussing this at a quilt show last September with two women who had been teachers and they gave me the last piece of information in the unraveling saga of Dick and Jane-why it was banned. They told me it was due to the way it portrayed the nuclear family and the role of women which some argued would hurt the feelings of children who did not come from that sort of background. No wonder Mrs. Lovequist thought they were a bunch of boobs and used it anyway!

That lady stuck it to the MAN. This made her awesome. She was also unafraid of the repercussions of taping the mouths of yappy six year olds shut. She just did not care. Her and my dad were both terrible subversives. Who can't appreciate the teacher that goes against policy for the good of their students? They did that.

Anyway, I have likely wasted enough time discussing the cataloging of the books and should get down to actually doing it. As in the cartoon, if I keep singing "I just want to organize the books" I'll never get around to actually organizing the books. Then I have to find space for them in the shed. This may prove difficult as there are already five or six boxes of them out there.

Thursday, 11 June 2009

If you all recall, I only get occasional visits from fibre fairies. They forget about my house frequently enough and I think they do it on purpose to be annoying.

So to make up for their lack of foresight someone brought some wool to the post office for mama to give me. Did I say some wool? I meant lots of wool.

I'm sure you're wondering how much is "lots"? Well...lots:

Yes sir, three bags full (and a bucket too). You know the rest.

And she sent along an old drum carder too...

I admit my first thought was "man I just payed 60 bucks for a pair of hand carders a few months ago!" But hey I can get good use out of that. And I got more fibre-just in time for experiments. I am moving my supplies slowly to Regina...